Monday, April 4, 2011

A Little Preview

Chrontendo Episode 37 will be ready in a couple days. Until then, I've posted a preview on Youtube. As far as I could see, there wasn't anything on Kaijuu Monogatari on Youtube, at least in English, so I've put up that segment.

One thing: Youtube's videos run at 30 FPS, so certain flicker effects, like the one I mention in the intro, don't show up. You'll have to wait for 60 FPS version on Archive for that.

10 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I love Chrontendo. It's one of the coolest things to put up on my second monitor when I'm working on 3D models. Before these last two generations, things were the wild west out there. Too much stuff is manufactured nowadays. There's a lot of worth in looking back at games from this 8-bit era, even if there are a load of interesting failures.

The wait between eps now blows, but Dr.Sparkle thanks for keeping the blog updated! You having a job and a life is far more important, I'm sure;)

Garsh, I would suggest to do away with keys entirely, along with booby trapped chests, constantly getting poisoned, and being killed every five minutes. Modern RPGs pretty much have done away with all that stuff. Or at least made their usage less frequent and less irritating.

And why would a group of guys armed with axes, swords, fireballs and magic missiles have such a hard time opening doors, anyway?

That was great in Neverwinter Nights (the Bioware one), when you couldn't open a chest you could just rip it open with your weapon...though in the Module Editor (or how that thing was named) you could define that the treasure has less value when you force it open instead of use rogue skills. But that general mechanic pisses me still of, I don't usually have thiefs or rogues in my party in RPGs, because they don't have skills I like to use. But some games force you to have them, otherwise you are fucked when chests or doors need to be open. That was better in the tactic-RPG-series Jagged Alliance, where most characters have multiple fields in which they are great in, and you need only one skill for lockpicking, which also is the skill needed for repairs...and most mechanics kick ass in these games.

Okay, fair enough, I guess. It's something that's always perplexed me. I never have understood the reasoning that a game designer uses to justify vanishing keys, but personally I like having as many alternative actions as possible other than just combat all the time. I feel like Zelda wouldn't be the same if none of the doors were ever locked.

I suppose keys have now been replaced by rouges or lock picking skills. I guess I don't really mind disappearing keys in principle, as long as they enhance the game; it's simply that the concept of a disposable key makes no logical sense. In Zelda, keys were used in a perfectly sensible fashion - to make exploring the dungeons more interesting. In Kaijuu Monogatari, they are just a pain in the ass, since you have to purchase them, they take up valuable inventory space, and you never know when you'll actually need one.

The same with disposable keys in Diablo II, I didn't realize that there are locked chests till I stumbled over the first. But hey, you could stack them on one inventory space...but later when Lord of Destruction hit the shelfs and I heard that the Assassin doesn't need a key to open shit I thought "cool...but hey, what was the sense of the mechanic in the first place?"